Rate this book

Kitų Kalba (2009)

by Clare Morrall(Favorite Author)

3.77 of 5 Votes: 3

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Gimtasis žodis

review 1: Clare Morrall writes brilliantly about oddity, separation, difference. In this novel, where Jessica and her 'difficult' husband Andrew meet as music students, she also does a wonderful job in conveying what it's like to be a classical musician, a performer.Mark Haddon was massively successful in fusing an exploration of the world of a young man who has Asperger's Syndrome with the detective fiction genre.This author is blending a story about autism with the sort of family story in which - with the help of time, love, patience and understanding - nearly every problem can be overcome. I felt as if both the heroine Jessica and her son were virtually forced into happy endings, by the writer - in a way that I didn't find wholly believable. I also struggled to accept that even... more a 'different' person like Jessica could, as a caring parent, be so completely unaware of her son's business activity.However despite some flawed plotting, Clare Morrall writes powerfully about the struggles that take place within families. I'm glad to have read this novel, even though everything seemed too dramatically, too neatly resolved, at the end.
review 2: I’ve yet to read a bad book by Clare Morrall; in particular I like the way she zeroes in on life’s oddball characters. In this novel, we meet Jessica, a woman so much like me it was creepy at times. Socially inept, she blunders into a marriage with a man who has bizarre personality traits of his own, and together they have a son who is also a social misfit. Tumultuous events follow and the author uses these to show what life is like when you struggle to relate to other people. The structure of the novel was interesting: three separate strands of the narrative cover the distant past, the more recent past and the present, and all are interspersed. There is also a mixture of first and third person narration, which can be disorientating but allows us to see some of the events from the perspective of the supporting characters. Stylistically it was reminiscent of William Boyd’s ‘Brazzaville Beach’. I liked the way most chapters build up to a dramatic event in Jessica’s life, each one exquisitely horrific (the concert, the picnic, the driving lesson...). One exception is the opening chapter which felt self-consciously literary and in which very little happens. I fear anyone picking this novel up in a bookshop and skimming the opening sections might write it off as slow or dull, when in fact the opposite is true. less

Download links for: Kitų kalba

Advertising